'All this emphasis on bonnets and re-doing of period dramas is demeaning and patronising. It's as if the film-makers think all the viewers can cope with is something they've already heard of before," says Nicola Beauman, founder of the printing house Persephone Books. Beauman, now in her early 60s, is the proud republisher of 75 early to mid 20th-century books, most of them by female authors, and many of which are, in her eyes, prime candidates for adaptation ("except maybe the cookery books"). Hence her bafflement at the BBC's recent production of Sense and Sensibility, which has, of course, been brought to the screen very successfully before. News that there's another version of Brideshead Revisited in production doesn't thrill Beauman either. "I don't understand how they get away with it," she fumes.

Persephone Books' current office and shop are one and the same. It's a building with well-trodden floorboards and a vaguely time-warped air on the outskirts of Bloomsbury. Old wooden desks nestle at the back of the small, low-lit front room, which is crammed full of towers of Persephone's distinctive dove grey-jacketed books. Vases of flowers rest on the least cluttered surfaces, while vintage posters espousing the benefits of joining everything from the Waaf to the suffragettes hang from the walls.

Beauman founded Persephone, a long-cherished dream, in 1999, when she came into some money through an inheritance. She had already had one career as a writer, getting her first book contract at 26, shortly after coming down from Newnham College, Cambridge. The book was meant to highlight the neglected women writers - among them Rosamond Lehman, Elinor Glyn and May Sinclair - she loved so much, but then "lots of other things, including babies, came in the way". Beauman was in her late 30s when she finally got to work on A Very Great Profession: The Women's Novel 1914-1939 and she went on to write biographies of the ghost story author Cynthia Asquith and EM Forster before eventually setting the Persephone wheels in motion.

From a small basement office in Clerkenwell and with only one other employee, Persephone was launched with 5,000 copies of 12 titles. The business got off to a slow start and "after about a year and a half, I slightly lost my nerve and our print run decreased," says Beauman. "We had a lot of books piling up in the warehouse, but then we got a bestseller, which was phenomenally lucky." Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, by Winifred Watson, is the tale of a governess's friendship with a glitzy nightclub singer in 1930s London. (A screen adaptation with Frances McDormand in the title role is due for release in the US next month.)

Though Beauman admits that running Persephone will never make her a multimillionaire, the company is thriving. It has 10,000 fans on its mailing list (until now, its books were only sold through mail order and the shop) and this April sees the release of the first three editions of Persephone Classics. These are new prints of Persephone's bestselling titles which are set to be available in bookshops across the UK and in the US this summer. The titles, which will be followed by three more in October, include Good Evening Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downe (a former London correspondent for the New Yorker), and Someone at a Distance, Dorothy Whipple's 1953 tale of the breakdown of a marriage. Whipple, who died in 1966, wrote 11 novels and was described by JB Priestley as the 20th century's Jane Austen. She is the author who Beauman believes is Persephone's most "unjustifiably neglected". Whipple topped bestseller lists in the 30s and 40s, but slipped under the radar with her final novel which, despite being "completely amazingly brilliant" is also, Beauman admits, old-fashioned. "It's her best novel, but it came out at a time when society was beginning to change radically."

The third title in the new series is Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. "She creates such real people," says Beauman of Watson. "You can't put the book down, because you so passionately want to know what's going to happen."

Many of the books that Persephone has rediscovered are gentle domestic tales written by largely middle- and upper-class white women; it has also reprinted long-lost cookery books and sells its own branded aprons. If Persephone is feminist, then, it is certainly a "soft" brand of feminism. Beauman is quick to point out that this is no less valid than its more visceral sister. "I'm definitely not a radical feminist," she says. "Most people think of feminism as being much more strident and outspoken, and, although I don't want to make myself sound incredibly wet, I'm not really interested in that because I find it unrealistic. It's not how the majority of women lead their lives. The majority of women do have children and do cook, but they also lead modern, interesting, full lives."

Beauman, however, has had her fair share of dealings with feminism's more outspoken wing. Her first book was published in 1983 by the feminist publishers Virago. "They were absolutely incredible," she says, "but the people who ran Virago believed in a much rawer kind of feminism. Mine is gentler, but I'm just as much of a feminist."

What Persephone does have in common with Virago is a love of aesthetics, and a hunger to create books that are not just a good read, but a mixture of style and substance. Beauman lovingly picks patterns from vintage fabrics and wallpapers from the year each of her books was originally published for the reprints' elegant endpapers and bookmarks. The shop window currently has a green-blue 1930s day dress on display, the fabric of which is used on the endpaper of Whipple's The Closed Door and Other Stories. In Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, the endpaper is from "a cushion that I've got that I remember going to buy the fabric for from John Lewis in 1958".

While most of Persephone's books are unearthed by Beauman and her dozen all-female staff, some are brought to light when customers bring their careworn copies into the shop. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, for instance, came to Beauman's attention when Henrietta Twycross-Martin brought in her mother's old copy. Twycross-Martin then found herself writing the preface for the reissue. The Casino, a 1940s short story collection by Margaret Bonham, was brought in by the author's daughter. "She told me her mother had written short stories. I said I'd love to see them because she looked so intelligent and lovely," says Beauman.

Books are in copyright in the UK for 70 years after the author's death, which means - to put it baldly - that authors have to have died before 1938 to be out of copyright and for Persephone to print them freely. Yet this is true of only a handful of Persephone's authors (though it includes their most famous writers, Katherine Mansfield and Frances Hodgson Burnett).

Sometimes tracking down copyright holders can be difficult, but Persephone has only printed one book for which it could not find the copyright holder - the 1949 manual How to Run Your Home without Help by Kay Smallshaw. Smallshaw's descendants need not worry, though. "Obviously if someone rang up and said, 'You've reprinted my mother's book'," says Beauman, "I would simply say, 'How absolutely wonderful that you've called! May I send you the cheque?'"